Two women were thrown from a raft and drowned near Alaska's Denali National Park, and nine other people who tried to rescue them were treated for hypothermia. The women, both 75, were in a raft with five people on a 13-mile scenic tour of the Nenana River, state Trooper Bill Tyler said. "They hit a swell in the water and then went into a whirlpool," Tyler said. "The raft was literally just sucked down." The women were the only ones thrown from the raft.

The railroad, once the engine that drove the economy around here, is on a collision course with the new money machine: tourism. Despite a railroad history so rich that the ski runs have names like Rail Bender, Derailer and Cannonball, this resort community high in the Rocky Mountains has passed an ordinance threatening engineers with a $300 fine or 90 days in jail if they blow their horns while traveling through town.

As soon as the raft hit a submerged tree, it flipped, tossing everyone into the frothy brown Kern River, made a torrent by the sudden, post-El Nino snowmelt of the High Sierra. Five people and their guide swam to shore. But a 13-year-old from Boise, Idaho, disappeared. On Thursday, two days after the accident, search-and-rescue crews found the girl submerged beneath a log near the area where the raft capsized.

A surge of swirling water roared through a narrow gorge, killing two white-water rafters and forcing 10 others to cling for life to the mossy, 1,800-foot walls overnight, authorities said Monday. In a daylong rescue effort, helicopters lowered wires into the gorge Monday to pull out cold, wet survivors from the rocks along the treacherous stretch of southwestern Oregon's Illinois River known as the Green Wall.

Westerners have been squabbling over water almost since the first pioneers crossed the Great Plains. Ranchers fought over water rights in river valleys that are the arteries of life here. Growing metropolises like Denver and Los Angeles diverted rural water over mountain ranges. In the West of the 1990s, with its booming growth and affluence, water is more than ever a contested prize.

Once upon a time, there was the adventure travel business and there was the senior travel business, and seldom did the two meet. But now, as Americans retire at earlier ages and stay healthy longer, "soft adventure" for seniors is in high demand. The result is that longtime operators of tours for seniors are lowering their minimum-age requirements, putting on safari hats and going into the adventure business.

They began their downstream journey in the bitter cold of a gray and gloomy morning, wondering what had become of the sun. Or of the spring, for that matter. This was early May, not December. But the mighty Kern River was mighty cold. Having boarded their rafts on a section of river beneath the Johnsondale Bridge, a dozen or so shivering paddlers gained momentum until, one by one, they were swallowed up by a gurgling monster of a rapid called Limestone.